


reach the epilogue (and then take it from the top again)

by Fox_the_Hermit



Series: unacceptable losses [1]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Temporary Character Death, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-19 04:50:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22038781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fox_the_Hermit/pseuds/Fox_the_Hermit
Summary: Ichigo's alive and healthy and whole. But too many people aren't (friends, family, the one single crush that hasn't had the time to get anywhere), and this isn't an epilogue to his story that's worth living in.He'd rather rewrite the whole damn thing from scratch.UraIchi PC4 Prompt #61 - Epilogue
Relationships: Urahara Kisuke/Kurotsuchi Mayuri/Kurosaki Ichigo
Series: unacceptable losses [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1586413
Comments: 9
Kudos: 176
Collections: UraIchi Prompt Challenge #4





	reach the epilogue (and then take it from the top again)

Ichigo feels- numb, kneeling there among the ruined buildings, clothes dusty and grimy, dirt sinking into his clothes. Which, technically, means he isn’t feeling anything at all, not really, not _properly_.

There are many casualties left by the Quincies. So many.

They’ve dragged out as many bodies as they could, laid them all out here, in the ruins of the first division compounds, among the black ash and white dust and the grey mess where they mix, trying to find people who know the names of the dead. The seated officers are meant to know, but many of them are themselves lying on the ground now.

Hundreds of dead shinigami that he doesn’t know are here, and then some more that he does.

At this point, maybe, it’d just be easier to make a list of the living and assume everyone else is dead.

Some corpses have no doubt already faded away too much to be identified even if found in time. Others too mangled to be recognised.

There’s murmurs in the background, people talking and dragging more bodies over.

He runs his hand through hair damp and matted with blood, tries to untangle the knots and clumps with his fingers. If his clothes were cleaner, he’d try using his sleeves to wipe the blood off the face.

It feels like Kisuke-san should have at least a little dignity in death.

Not this _mess_ of a body, covered in blood and ragged stitches.

Yoruichi’s body is right next to his, their hands clasped so tight that not even dying separated them.

There was nothing left of Nel’s body by the time they were found.

From the impression left in the dust, Ichigo had gathered that she’d been trying to pull them out of range of that final explosion.

And now they’re all… gone.

He’d never even had a chance to tell him… anything he’d wanted to say, lately. Somehow, it felt like he had all the time in the world to decide whether the wanted to say that he liked him or not, like he still had years ahead of him in which to figure out what he really felt if it was anything important.

Fighting wars for most of his teenage years hadn’t left him much time for personal life shit.

And now the latest one just… took that decision from him, because even if he says it out loud now, Kisuke won’t hear him anyway.

There’s a loud scraping, rubble disturbed by a dragging weight, and Ichigo unwillingly looks up.

He doesn’t quite recognise the shinigami at first, captain’s haori missing, paint gone, everything covered in blood left by a- it’s so damaged it doesn’t even look like a corpse, at first, until Ichigo makes out a charred remnant of a lieutenant’s band around the thing that probably used to be an arm. There’s a twelve on it.

Kurotsuchi’s golden eyes are _molten_ with rage, and Ichigo thinks that if he’d had any reiatsu left after whatever battles he’d fought, it’d be lashing out against everything around him.

Well.

Ichigo wouldn’t have held it against him.

He’s just lost his daughter.

Daughter.

Shit.

How is Ichigo going to tell Jinta and Ururu, who stayed in the human world, that Kisuke and Yoruichi aren’t coming back?

Maybe someone else can do that.

There’s a sharp pain in his arm, and he blinks as he’s yanked up.

Kurotsuchi’s eyes are fixed on him, mad in a way that Ichigo’d never seen them before.

“You are going to fix this.” That rasp sounds _awful_ , like someone shoved a cheese grater down Kurotsuchi’s throat and then pulled it back out. Considering some of the things the Quincy could do, maybe it had been.

Ichigo shrugs, helplessly. He’s not Orihime. He can’t bring back the dead, and she’s gone too, now.

“You are going to help _me_ fix it, then.” He pauses to take a breath. “There might be something in _his_ lab. Something about- time travel.”

* * *

They show up in Karakura like that, bloody and Kurotsuchi still injured - if they can walk, then the healers won’t have time for them for _days_ \- and there’s a secret entrance to Kisuke’s underground labs and thank fuck for that because Ichigo doesn’t want to explain anything to Tessai yet. Or the kids. Or his Dad.

Kurotsuchi seems to have an easy time with the passwords - the ones that Ichigo doesn’t already have, anyway, which is very few of them, and then he kicks him out with a demand to not come back unless he has a full report on every Quincy that participated in the battle.

* * *

It turns out that gathering that information takes... time.

Between trying to organise the living, dealing with the Hollows in the living world, and cleaning up the mess, most people don’t have time to talk, unless they’re so badly injured they can’t even bark out orders.

Ichigo finds it more useful to read the reports people still keep filing than asking around, and spends his nights studying _them_ , rather than preparing to finish school or going to university.

There’s little to nothing that he can gather about the one that killed his Kisuke, other than the fact that it took down two shinigami and two arrancar to do so, and that they all perished in the attempt.

And then he thinks about Aizen, and reads the reports about shinigami patrols for over two hundred years, and wonders about how a hundred and some years ago people didn’t notice the increasing fatality rates among Shinigami and how no one ever questioned Kisuke’s exile.

* * *

“If we _can_ go back… how _early_ could we go?” Ichigo asks.

Kurotsuchi frowns at him, before he answers.

“If we can only travel to when we existed... I, at least, would not attempt to go earlier than the earliest moment of my life that I can remember,” he says, slowly. “Why?”

“Because… I think we should go back to before Yhwach gains the ability to gain power from the living Quincies. There was that prophecy that Uryu told me - it took him nine hundred years to regain his pulse, ninety to regain intelligence, and nine to gain the ability to steal powers. If… he could absorb powers when I was nine, we’d need to go back by at least twenty years to be on the safe side.”

“And possibly a few decades more, if we want him to have the minimum possible intelligence.”

But that’s not all what Ichigo is thinking of, not really, and Kurotsuchi seems to sense it.

“And… if we could go back far enough. We could, maybe, stop most of the things Aizen has done over the past century. Even stop the Hollowfication incident. Stop the exile.”

“...If we were to do that Kurosaki-san, then my daughter would never have existed, and neither would your family.”

“And if we fail to kill the Quincy because they are already too strong for just two of us ten years ago, I doubt we’d get another chance to go back even earlier to try to do it. If we go really far back- well, none of our friends would ever have _died_ , either.”

It occurs to Ichigo, then, that Kurotsuchi probably doesn’t know one of the things the Quincies did to keep him away from Soul Society long enough.

The destruction in Karakura around his home is too out of the way to find when grocery shopping, after all.

* * *

Ichigo doesn’t quite think the whole thing is going to work until an apple materialises in the lab one day.

 _Exactly_ identical to the apple in his hand, which decides to explode and burn his hand.

But that answers some important questions.

Now they just need to prepare everything else, and figure out their battle plan for the Quincies.

Aizen… they can figure out what to do with him when they get there.

The Quincies can spy on their planning sessions without either of them knowing much, much easier.

* * *

“Fine, if you want to rescue that moron from most of the pieces of _shit_ life’s thrown at him… fine. But if I have to serve as his third seat again, you better suffer with me, and see for yourself what you have wrought.”

* * *

Turns out it’s possible to just make a Garganta into the Wandenreich, because apparently it’s possible to make one into anywhere, if you know where you’re going and have ambition enough and can also regrow limbs when not everything makes it.

Hollow regeneration is a blessing, and, really, so are Gargantas. Ichigo’ll need to thank Kisuke for all this, one day. Not that he’ll know what Ichigo means.

Using one without being at least a little bit Hollow though… that will need figuring out.

* * *

Ichigo’s not sure why he doesn’t tell anyone else about the project, even now that it’s close to completion.

Maybe because they’d think he’d mad. Maybe because they’re all trying to move on, and he doesn’t want to worry them.

Maybe because no one else seems like they could fight another war.

And even if he says…

If it doesn’t work and kills them-

Tessai has two kids to look after.

Chad isn’t going to be able to fight, and Uryu will likely as not be killed by the Onmi if the shinigami of the past ever find out that there’s a Quincy in Soul Society.

All the other shinigami? There’s already enough dead ones. If they lose any more Captains- how many they have left right now, five? Kyouraku, Soi Fon, Shinji, Rose. Four, even, and the rest are dead or powerless or in no condition to fight again.

* * *

“I have an idea for how to deal with the Quincies, Kurosaki. But you aren’t going to like it.”

He’s right. Ichigo doesn’t like it.

But this is... something he’s ready to do for Kisuke. Or at least, ready to let someone else do, he supposes, and if it doesn’t end in death, it’ll be fine.

Ichigo’s fine, after all. Mostly.

And he doubts he could _stop_ a determined Kurotsuchi from doing it anyway. Might as well make sure there aren’t too many casualties.

And if the Bankai-created poison will all be tainted with Hollow reiatsu… that’ll make the Quincies that much easier to defeat.

* * *

It’s Tessai that, almost surprisingly, explodes at the idea.

“ _No_. We are not attempting that.”

Ichigo would have thought that being friends with a mad genius would have long since desensitized him to mad ideas, but apparently not.

“Imagine all the lives this would save,” Ichigo says. He doesn’t say ‘ _imagine if Yoruichi and Kisuke were not dead today’_.

He doesn’t think he needs to.

* * *

They make their own incomplete Hogyoku, feed it the energy roiling over the streets where the battles took place, until Kurotsuchi is satisfied that it’ll be enough.

Tessai is an ominous thundercloud following them around, who refuses to say a word, but also doesn’t _leave_.

He doesn’t approve, but he understands that they need to do it. To try, at the very least.

And he doesn’t _not_ want them to succeed.

He just _thinks_ they won’t manage the time travel, or even the Hollowfication.

Well, Kurotsuchi does leave all the instructions for the machine to Ichigo before they go into the training grounds, making sure that Ichigo could leave for the past alone, if need be, so maybe there’s a grain of truth to the assumption that they won’t manage even this stage.

* * *

Mayuri Hollowfies himself, Tessai stabilises him with the Hogyoku, and Ichigo fights him while he wrestles with his Inner Hollow.

It’s _disturbing_ , watching a body morph and shift like that. Ichigo wonders if he looked the same when the Visored were fighting him, and understands why Kisuke didn’t fight Ichigo himself.

Knowing he might have to kill his… friend? if this doesn’t work makes it harder to do it. And trying to fight something so intent on killing him without killing it back takes more control than Ichigo thought he’d possessed.

The transformation is half-way through when Mayuri regains control, the changes vanishing just as large, moth-like wings finish sprouting from his back. Like the ones his Zanpakutou spirit had, if Ichigo remembers right.

Well.

Now, after fifteen months, all that’s left is just the hard part.

And then Kisuke won’t be dead anymore.

* * *

“ _Fuck,_ ” Ichigo curses, slamming hard into something very solid, and very cold, and very white.

He blinks at the floor a little, before looking up, and around.

He’s in a cell - a small bare cell with nothing but a block of the same stone as the floor inside it. And also himself and Mayuri, of course.

There’s no table, or a chair, or a shelf, or _anything_ , really. Not even a blanket or a pillow on the slab meant to function as a bed.

They’re in the _distant_ past, that’s for sure, because Ichigo’s never seen Mayuri look so _plain_ before the Quincies attacked.

Mayuri’s meanwhile busy with a kidou-locked chain around his ankle- or, rather, busy with- Yeah, he’s definitely not gonna watch that regrow, thanks.

“Eurgh, you could have at least warned me,” he groans, and turns away.

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d be so squeamish, considering what your life has been like.”

“It just looks _wrong._ ”

“Whatever you say.”

He stays turned away until the little reiatsu escaping Mayuri stops feeling quite so Hollow, before he rolls his shoulders, cracks his knuckles, and opens a garganta from the Maggot’s Nest straight to the heart of the Wandenreich.

No poison-dealing Quincy is going to be killing Kisuke a hundred years in the future.

* * *

Somewhere after flooding the Wandenreich with poison, killing stragglers - and fuck, Askin and his ability to control poisons was a pain, even with two Visored shinigami who fought two wars he’s hard to deal with - and getting back to Mayuri’s cell, sake had been acquired.

Several barrels of sake.

Ichigo frowns, cradling his aching head, as he tries to remember where they got it, and draws up a blank.

They finished cleaning up the Wandenreich, tried to decide what they wanted to do next, and how they were going to explain any of it to anyone… He think they decided on explaining it to Kisuke, back in their cell, because they could be sure Aizen didn’t have camera flies in there, but after that?

Ichigo has no idea.

Wait.

There was something about being bored, and celebrating, and missing people, and not having anyone else from their time-

Oh. Nope. That part he doesn’t want to remember.

Kisuke himself is standing outside the cell, looking so very _young_ , without quite so much darkness in his eyes and weight of the world on his shoulders, and absolutely _bewildered._

Ichigo opens his mouth. Closes. Looks sideways, hoping to see Mayuri ready to give out a coherent explanation.

And sees Askin’s bodiless head lying in a corner instead.

Right.

He should probably start with that one.

“So, okay, before you do anything, or ring an alarm, you should know that that guy was going to kill you in a hundred and five years.” Ichigo glances around the cell again, and- yep, there’s Mayuri, mostly sans clothes, something that Ichigo never wants to think about or remember again. “And I think we’re going to need more alcohol.”

* * *

Ichigo wakes up with an even _more_ painful headache, surrounded by some very new equipment for distilling alcohol, some very fancy and very empty barrels and bottles of alcohol.

And two people in… various states of undress. Mostly complete states of undress.

Under those covers, possibly entire ones.

Outside the cell stands Yoruichi, and someone that looks _exactly_ like Ichigo.

Shiba Kaien, the previous head of the Shibas?

Shit.

Well.

He can trust Yoruichi with the future.

She can definitely be friendly to a stranger, and won’t… like, be a responsible head of the Onmitsukido and interrogate him, and won’t need Kisuke to explain things to her too, to verify anything said.

A Yoruichi that looks like she can’t decide whether to be deeply amused, deeply suspicious, or drag Ichigo off to threaten/kill him for being… naked. Under the same covers. As a possibly completely naked Kisuke.

Right.

If he opens a Garganta, takes Mayuri and Kisuke with him to Hueco Mundo, he can probably fight Nelliel and Harribel, become friends with them, topple Barragan, become King, and live in peace in Hueco Mundo, right? Aizen comes by, Ichigo’ll just kill him, and that’s all their problems solved forever.

_Right?_

**Author's Note:**

> [Cywscross' UraIchi Server](https://discordapp.com/invite/ADFnKTZ#_=_)


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